I’ll be getting an iPhone pro in a week or two, and have been an android user since forever. Never used any apple products before, this will for now be a secondary work phone for me. I’ll also have their Apple One? service.
Looking for app recommendations, tips, tricks any and all suggestions anyone might have for a first time iOS user, to make the transition a little smoother and a little fun.
Thank you all.
Turn on Low Battery Mode if you want your battery to last longer. Also turn off Background App Refresh to stop apps draining battery in the background. Notifications will still work.
Set AirDrop to Contacts Only, to avoid random people sending you files. In Siri settings, turn off “Learn from this app” and “Show content in search” to prevent background indexing from draining battery after each new iOS update. Also turn off Bluetooth if you don’t need it.
You can search for any of these at the top of Settings.
I agree with the rest of your points but low battery mode noticeably affects performance and experience for me, I immediately notice the loss of 120Hz display and dimmer screen (though idk if that could be overridden by disabling auto brightness in Accessibility) but even more importantly overall system performance is reduced since it also slows cpu/gpu performance in favor of efficiency and it’s just too noticeable for me to use the mode anytime other than when I’m actually trying to stretch battery life if I can’t get to a charger for a while so basically its intended purpose. Also stuff like disabling HDR and most 5G can make some things look wonky that were expecting it and putting off iCloud sync / background tasks for an extended period of time would probably not be beneficial for most users.
Unless you just meant use it occasionally, but I guess I interpreted you meant turn it on and leave it on to improve battery life overall but it’s probably not worth gimping the capabilities of the expensive devices you paid for just to last a couple or few more hours between charges lol
Unless you have a mini iPhone version I hear their battery capacity isn’t too great
Depends on what you want and what your priorities are. I hate charging my phone multiple times a day. Don’t really notice the other stuff much. I had the battery replaced on my older iPhone 6. It was an okay experience, but I don’t wanna deal with that hassle again soon.
In Accessibility->Display & Text Size are options to make bold text or configure auto-brightness if you want. If you set up an iCloud, you can set up “Advanced Data Protection” which makes most data stored in iCloud E2EE, would provide recovery codes and would have to set up a recovery contact I believe, so that’s just an option if you’re interested.
If you use any heavy-customization or such, Apple is a walled garden, so you probably won’t be able to 100% replicate your workflow on there as you have on Android but the big name apps, Google Calendar, Gmail, Outlook and such should sync nicely.
Overall though I believe the setup is pretty intuitive, if you stick with Safari you can change your search engine and other settings in the settings app on the phone as well.
AdGuard is a good adblocker, Bitwarden is a good cross-platform password manager if you need.
Go to Settings -> Screen Time -> Content Restrictions and deny changes to Passcode and Account. Make sure your Screen Time passcode is different from your phone unlock passcode. If your phone gets stolen and they somehow know your unlock passcode, this setting will stop them from locking you out of your Apple account. There are other restrictions you might like to set in that same menu, but the passcode one is crucial.
I switched earlier this year.
Shortcuts app:
- Shortcuts has Tasker vibes. You can do a lot with it, especially automation.
- Lmk if you’re a Google Home user. You can setup Shortcuts so that Siri passes on commands to Google Assistant.
- You can even customize the Action button to run a Shortcut. I’ve got mine to check if it’s connected to my home WiFi, then toggle bedroom lights; if connected to work WiFi, then… etc.
- Take advantage of Focus modes (Work, Sleep, etc.) because Shortcuts can use that as a condition.
Apple TV: Ted Lasso is worth watching.
3rd party apps worth mentioning:
- QuickScan. Completely free, with optional donations. Create multipage OCR’d PDFs with your camera.
- Brave browser mainly for ad-free YouTube.
- Paperback if you read manga, manhwa, etc.
Lemmy apps: Voyager is the most frequently updated and smoothest, but it lacks some QoL features that I enjoy in other apps, such as Thunder. Give all of them a try.
Sleep alarm with gradually increasing volume: you need to use the 1st party Health app to set up your nightly alarm.
Additional settings:
- Back Tap. You can customize double tap and triple tap with a limited set of actions.
- Reachability. Top of the screen temporarily shifts down.
- Haptic Touch. Set to Fast so that long presses don’t take so long to activate.
Hey thanks! Really useful info!
I just checked and the Vivaldi iOS app opens the official YouTube iOS app (unless you uninstall it I assume) when I tried to go to the YouTube site in it. I mostly use Safari/Firefox, is there some setting I’m missing?
Btw, I think the most useful setting for the action button is to assign it to open a shortcut folder. It opens as a popup window which at least in portrait fits up to 8 shortcuts of any kind. I have one shortcut as an “action center” which has a lot of random functions I can choose from in a menu (even triggering other shortcuts in a different folder) and the setup is relatively simple. The rest change depending on needs but mostly I have smartlight on/off triggers, app icons for frequently used apps, frequently used shortcuts, I have one that’s just the flashlight but on a lower setting than the lowest “notch” in the control center flashlight. Also one for the new Translate speech feature which you can use in shortcuts so you don’t have to assign the entire function of the action button to it. Anyway I can’t go back to just making the button toggle mute when I can have it toggle mute or do any 7+ other things of my choice but that’s just me. It feels like a weirdly customizable part in the iOS ecosystem tbh since the possibilities are pretty vast given what can be done via Shortcuts.
Vivaldi: the one setting I changed was to block both Trackers and Ads. I do have the YouTube app installed. My Vivaldi bookmark for YouTube is for https://m.youtube.com/ other than that I’m clueless on why Vivaldi launches the YouTube app when you try to go to YouTube.
The Shortcut folder is a great idea. I’ve currently got a Shortcut folder as a widget stack on my Home Screen.
The mobile link worked!!! Thanks
Voyager is the most frequently updated and smoothest, but it lacks some QoL features
What features if I may ask? Thanks in advance!
As someone who moved from Android to iOS this year, I miss the reachability of being able to swipe back from either side of the screen. Like many of the other Lemmy apps, Voyager lets you customize gestures for Posts and Comments. I disabled swipe-right because that’s iOS’s Back gesture, but I still need to start from the very far left edge of the screen in Voyager. Some other apps, after having disabled those swipe-right gestures, allow me to swipe back without having to reach the far left edge. It’s way more comfortable for me as a right handed user.
Oh, full screen swipe back? That is definitely a feature I’m interested in bringing to voyager. Thank you for your reply!
Hey just wanted to say I love Voyager! The iOS app is a bit better as far as responsiveness to gestures than wefwef was since it was bound by webkit I know. It’s actually my main app for Lemmy currently probably mostly because it’s just the perfect design (rip Apollo) other apps leave me wanting different post and comment appearances or overall feel even if they boast more features or customization.
P.S. not sure if it’s placebo but I swear the back swipe is more likely to trigger if I do it higher up on my screen closer to where the actual back button appears on the topleft. Full screen swipe back would be great!
Thanks 🙏
Most of the problems /glitches you’ll encounter are fixed by restarting your iPhone (not turning it off then back on). This is how to perform that.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/force-restart-iphone-iph8903c3ee6/ios
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taking a screen shot is useful from time to time.
Same here. Just joined #teamapple a few months ago. Overall, the transition has been fairly painless and what features the iPhone lacks, it makes up with new features I never realized I needed until I had them, lol.
Overall, I have been very impressed with iOS and Apple, in general. Though admittedly, some of the fanboyism rubbed off once I acknowledged that Apple is a company like any other and their bottom line is always the most important factor. I am referring to their recent increase to their Apple one plans. Though if I am being honest, it is still a better deal than any other OEM offers and as the price of everything else has increased lately, I can’t really begrudge them for the price increase.
As far as app recommendations, Android left a pretty sour taste in my mouth, to the point where I use only first party versions of apps, just to keep the ecosystem tight.
I guess my only piece of advice I would give you, is to not treat iOS like it’s Android. Don’t start handicapping your device features because you think you need to to get decent battery life. There’s no need for that, iOS is optimized a hell of a lot better than Android and the experience should reflect that rather quickly.
